In today’s episode, the universe won’t even allow Ro Laren to keep a Canadian boyfriend. But she possesses some important intel that will be crucial in stopping the Dominion from carrying out Wormhole II: Artificial Boog-a-loo. Will Data give in to the temptation to run horrors_of_war.exe?Will today’s canned fish populate tomorrow’s aquariums? And is there anything Picard won’t tug on? All this and more in Behind Enemy Lines, the book with the ACTION FLAP.

Behind Enemy Lines1They don’t put the titles of the individual installments on the covers of these Dominion War books, for some reason.
Author: John Vornholt
Pages: 269
Published: November 1998
Timeline:
Prerequisites: Ro Laren made eight appearances in Star Trek: The Next Generation, starting with “Ensign Ro” (5×03) and ending with “Preemptive Strike” (7×25). Sam Lavelle and Taurik recur from “Lower Decks” (7×15). The Dominion War and its principal races originated in Deep Space Nine, and the war started in earnest at the end of season five.
Not to be confused with: The 2001 war movie starring Owen Wilson and Gene Hackman that is also called Behind Enemy Lines

The Dominion War rages on concurrently with the events of our last read/watch, Star Trek: Insurrection, and now we get directly into the trenches. This mini-series is a bit of an odd duck, structurally speaking. Books one and three, written by John Vornholt, comprise an original duology showcasing not only the efforts of the Enterprise-E crew, but also some tertiary fan favorites, like Ro Laren, as well as Sam Lavelle (now a lieutenant) and Taurik from the season seven “Lower Decks” episode. Books two and four, meanwhile, are novelizations that cram the events of roughly six episodes apiece from Deep Space Nine’s Dominion War arc into a single volume and are written by Diane Carey. I wasn’t expecting to have to refamiliarize myself with so much ground. Maybe I’ll just reread summaries for those.

Behind Enemy Lines starts off checking in on Ro Laren, who at this time is living a peaceful life on a backwater planet called Galion with a human weapons smuggler named only Derek. She learns from him that the planet is being evacuated by the Cardassians because the Dominion wants to build a second stable wormhole nearby in order to bypass the Bajoran one. Ro is made captain of a humble shipping vessel called the Orb of Peace and sent to Bajor to ride things out in a neutral place, but after shaking a couple of nosy Dominion ships, she turns normal Ro back on, does a uey to defend Galion, and ultimately has to be saved from the Jem’Hadar by the Enterprise-E. After Ro tells Picard about the new wormhole and how it’s allegedly being built by Federation slave labor, he decides to investigate and undertakes a fact-finding mission to cut through the Badlands with an upgraded Orb of Peace and a handpicked crew that includes Geordi and a bunch of somewhat green ensigns.

Those rumors are true, because two of those Federation slave workers are Sam Lavelle and Taurik, from “Lower Decks” (the TNG episode, not the cartoon). Sam in particular is highly regarded by the other slaves, acting as a liaison between them and the Jem’Hadar, and receiving negligibly better treatment as a result. Shortly after a shift where a mishap involving an unstable building material kills several workers, Cardassians, and Jem’Hadar, he is summoned by a Vorta named Joulesh to meet a Founder, who offers him a ship and a small crew to mine Corzanium (capitalization sic), the only substance strong enough to comprise the entrance of an artifical wormhole, from a nearby black hole.

For the most part, Sam gets to pick his own crew, but one person he’s forced to take along is Enrak Grof, an unjoined Trill scientist and noted collaborator. Grof gave his services to the Dominion because, unlike his own kind, they recognized his brilliant scientific mind and accepted him. He is loathed by almost everyone on both sides, but he believes the science will benefit everyone in the galaxy, not just the Dominion, which would read as hopelessly naive even if you didn’t have the “benefit” of living in 2025 and bearing witness to an endless procession of feckless elected officials and low-information voters get their faces eaten by the leopards. Naturally, having been entrusted with a ship, Sam’s first instinct is to hatch an escape plan, but he has to work around Grof to pull it off—though a less foreseeable factor would be the little Bajoran ship that could, coming in hot out of the Badlands, ready to destroy any vessel whose work advances the Dominion’s plans…

Ro’s plot is advertised on the back cover, and justifiably so, but the Sam/Taurik one came as a total (welcome) surprise for me. Echoes of their friend Sito Jaxa‘s fate are bound to creep in, of course, and she’s mentioned a few times, but so far there’s more hope that they’re going to get out of this one alive. My favorite parts of the book are theirs; and I always though Alexander Enberg had a nice Vulcan timbre that’s easy to pull from memory. Here’s hoping Sam gets to talk to Riker again in book three, and maybe this time not trip over his own feet so much, although Riker seems pretty all up in the guts of the commander of the starbase the Enterprise-E has to spend a while getting repaired at after really taking it on the chin during a skirmish, so who knows.

The only real dud plot in this one is Data having to hang out by himself on a methane-covered ice world tracking the Orb of Peace on long-range sensors. Sitting and waiting isn’t that interesting in the best of circumstances, but Data’s interior life is barely up to the task of holding up this D-plot. Will he turn his emotion chip on and become wracked with a flood of hopelessness and despair, or will he not? Riveting stuff.

The Dominion War is one of my favorite eras in Star Trek because it’s so rare to see the Federation on their back foot, and it’s a good opportunity for characters we love to use their wits in a different way. It’s the truest test of mettle a lot of Deep Space Nine‘s characters ever go through, and while it’s sort of understandable why they never canonically did anything of the sort with the Next Generation cast, in some ways it’s also a little wild. Can you imagine the Dominion War spilling over into theaters? Alas, that wasn’t the age of such crossovers. As always, these humble little paperbacks suit me just fine.

MVP & LVP

• I gotta say the MVP is probably Ro Laren. If she hadn’t turned back around to fight for Galion and gotten bailed out by the Enterprise-E, would they have ever gotten the intel about the artificial wormhole? Might have changed the course of the whole war.
• LVP goes to Data. Granted, no one else can sit there breathing methane while tracking Picard, Ro, and Geordi on long-range sensors—but who else would want to?

Stray Bits

• Cover Art Corner: The Dominion War novels come with a fun little cover flap featuring their respective series’s captain on the inside. Here we get Action Picard. He’s not wearing the top tunic—must be serious!

• Who’s That Ship Named After? The Enterprise gets reinforcements from the Carla Romney and the Sharansky, both Akira-class ships. Carla Romney is a dean at Boston University who’s done a lot of work in the medical and biotech fields (and, if I had to guess, a personal acquaintance of Vornholt’s). The Sharansky is most likely named after Natan Sharansky, an Israeli human rights activist.
• It’s so funny to me that Ro’s boyfriend is just named “Derek.” If not for the fact that we do actually see him for a few pages, it would be giving off some real Canadian-boyfriend vibes.
• “Sam fought the temptation to ask this advanced being why it was so important to conquer the Alpha Quadrant. He supposed it was the same arrogance that had driven Europeans to conquer the Americas or Cardassia to conquer Bajor—a certainty of their moral and intellectual superiority.” — Comparing European colonizers to Cardassians? It’s a spicy meatball, but one that goes down with less heartburn than you’d think. Might even be too kind, given what you could argue it eventually led to. (66)
• “Picard tugged on his earring, a tic he was beginning to develop.” — Only beginning? It may not be earrings specifically, but he’s had the tug bug for quite some time now. (91)
• Sardines inhabit the aquarium on Starbase 209. “At one time, they were a staple food source for our ancestors,” Commander Shana Winslow marvels. Got any other crazy specimens in that tank? Tuna? An anchovy, maybe? (238)

Final Assessment

Good. Since Rick Berman doesn’t play very nice with shows like Deep Space Nine, which have serialization and continuity, he would rather use his toys to make a (comparatively) low-stakes, self-contained movie, so this is probably going to be one of your best chances to see what the Enterprise-E and some other minor players were up to during this time. Some characters’ appearances were a pleasant surprise, and I think just seeing them did a lot to brighten up this read; being used well by Vornholt is just gravy. I think I’m going to enjoy the original-story half of this miniseries more than the episode-recap half, but novelizations are pretty hard to screw up, so overall I’m expecting this whole four-book romp to be a decent time.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to read seven episode recaps to make sure I’m up to speed on the next book. I may die of toxic Fandom exposure. Pray for my eyeballs, please.

NEXT TIME: A Call to Arms